rigorousintuition.ca

seemslikeadream » 15 Nov 2018 14:09 wrote:

Carole Cadwalladr
‏
Here's the whole incredible story. Kudos to @nytimes. Without it, we'd never know @Facebook execs castigated employees for investigating Russian interference. Then smeared its critics with anti-semitic tropes that it lifted straight from the Kremlin
https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/stat ... 4393305090

Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis

Nov. 14, 2018
Facebook has gone on the attack as one scandal after another — Russian meddling, data sharing, hate speech — has led to a congressional and consumer backlash.Tom Brenner for The New York Times

<snip>
In October 2017, Facebook also expanded its work with a Washington-based consultant, Definers Public Affairs, that had originally been hired to monitor press coverage of the company. Founded by veterans of Republican presidential politics, Definers specialized in applying political campaign tactics to corporate public relations — an approach long employed in Washington by big telecommunications firms and activist hedge fund managers, but less common in tech.

Definers had established a Silicon Valley outpost earlier that year, led by Tim Miller, a former spokesman for Jeb Bush who preached the virtues of campaign-style opposition research. For tech firms, he argued in one interview, a goal should be to “have positive content pushed out about your company and negative content that’s being pushed out about your competitor.”
<snip>

Then Facebook went on the offensive. Mr. Kaplan prevailed on Ms. Sandberg to promote Kevin Martin, a former Federal Communications Commission chairman and fellow Bush administration veteran, to lead the company’s American lobbying efforts. Facebook also expanded its work with Definers.

On a conservative news site called the NTK Network, dozens of articles blasted Google and Apple for unsavory business practices. One story called Mr. Cook hypocritical for chiding Facebook over privacy, noting that Apple also collects reams of data from users. Another played down the impact of the Russians’ use of Facebook.

The rash of news coverage was no accident: NTK is an affiliate of Definers, sharing offices and staff with the public relations firm in Arlington, Va. Many NTK Network stories are written by staff members at Definers or America Rising, the company’s political opposition-research arm, to attack their clients’ enemies. While the NTK Network does not have a large audience of its own, its content is frequently picked up by popular conservative outlets, including Breitbart.

Mr. Miller acknowledged that Facebook and Apple do not directly compete. Definers’ work on Apple is funded by a third technology company, he said, but Facebook has pushed back against Apple because Mr. Cook’s criticism upset Facebook.

If the privacy issue comes up, Facebook is happy to “muddy the waters,” Mr. Miller said over drinks at an Oakland, Calif., bar last month.

On Thursday, after this article was published, Facebook said that it had ended its relationship with Definers, without citing a reason.

<snip>

“Depicting Jews as an octopus encircling the globe is a classic anti-Semitic trope,” the organization wrote. “Protest Facebook — or anyone — all you want, but pick a different image.” The criticism was soon echoed in conservative outlets including The Washington Free Beacon, which has sought to tie Freedom from Facebook to what the publication calls “extreme anti-Israel groups.”

An A.D.L. spokeswoman, Betsaida Alcantara, said the group routinely fielded reports of anti-Semitic slurs from journalists, synagogues and others. “Our experts evaluate each one based on our years of experience, and we respond appropriately,” Ms. Alcantara said. (The group has at times sharply criticized Facebook, including when Mr. Zuckerberg suggested that his company should not censor Holocaust deniers.)

Facebook also used Definers to take on bigger opponents, such as Mr. Soros, a longtime boogeyman to mainstream conservatives and the target of intense anti-Semitic smears on the far right. A research document circulated by Definers to reporters this summer, just a month after the House hearing, cast Mr. Soros as the unacknowledged force behind what appeared to be a broad anti-Facebook movement.

He was a natural target. In a speech at the World Economic Forum in January, he had attacked Facebook and Google, describing them as a monopolist “menace” with “neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions.”

Definers pressed reporters to explore the financial connections between Mr. Soros’s family or philanthropies and groups that were members of Freedom from Facebook, such as Color of Change, an online racial justice organization, as well as a progressive group founded by Mr. Soros’s son. (An official at Mr. Soros’s Open Society Foundations said the philanthropy had supported both member groups, but not Freedom from Facebook, and had made no grants to support campaigns against Facebook.)

Definers also circulated research about other critics of Facebook, such as Diamond and Silk, the pro-Trump social media stars who had claimed they were treated unfairly by Facebook.

<snip>

In large letters were her stage directions: “Slow, Pause, Determined.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/tech ... e=Homepage

Facebook Cuts Ties With Definers Public Affairs Following Outcry

Nov. 15, 2018
A Facebook logo reflected on an advertisement board outside the United States Capitol in Washington in October. Facebook had initially hired Definers Public Affairs, a consulting firm, to monitor news about the social network.Tom Brenner for The New York Times

<snip>
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/tech ... soros.html

<snip>

George Soros' foundations blast Facebook as threat to democracy

Michael Sykes1 hour ago
Responding to a bombshell New York Times piece, the president of George Soros' Open Society Foundations, Paul Gaspard, said Facebook's "methods threaten the very values underpinning our democracy" in a letter addressed to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

The backdrop: The Times article alleged — among other things — that Facebook utilized a Republican-oriented public relations group to help navigate Washington politics during its user privacy controversies. That group also reportedly singled out Soros, who is often targeted by the right, and Open Society as "the unacknowledged force behind what appeared to be a broad anti-Facebook movement."

The full text of the letter:

Dear Ms. Sandberg:
<snip>

Patrick Gaspard

President | Open Society Foundations
https://www.axios.com/facebook-george-s ... 8c529.html

Parliament seizes cache of Facebook internal papers

Documents alleged to contain revelations on data and privacy controls that led to Cambridge Analytica scandal

Carole Cadwalladr
Sat 24 Nov 2018 16.00 EST
Parliament has used its legal powers to seize internal Facebook documents in an extraordinary attempt to hold the US social media giant to account after chief executive Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly refused to answer MPs’ questions.

The cache of documents is alleged to contain significant revelations about Facebook decisions on data and privacy controls that led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It is claimed they include confidential emails between senior executives, and correspondence with Zuckerberg.

Damian Collins, the chair of the culture, media and sport select committee, invoked a rare parliamentary mechanism to compel the founder of a US software company, Six4Three, to hand over the documents during a business trip to London. In another exceptional move, parliament sent a serjeant at arms to his hotel with a final warning and a two-hour deadline to comply with its order. When the software firm founder failed to do so, it’s understood he was escorted to parliament. He was told he risked fines and even imprisonment if he didn’t hand over the documents.

“We are in uncharted territory,” said Collins, who also chairs an inquiry into fake news. “This is an unprecedented move but it’s an unprecedented situation. We’ve failed to get answers from Facebook and we believe the documents contain information of very high public interest.”

The seizure is the latest move in a bitter battle between the British parliament and the social media giant. The struggle to hold Facebook to account has raised concerns about limits of British authority over international companies that now play a key role in the democratic process.

Facebook, which has lost more than $100bn in value since March when the Observer exposed how Cambridge Analytica had harvested data from 87m US users, faces another potential PR crisis. It is believed the documents will lay out how user data decisions were made in the years before the Cambridge Analytica breach, including what Zuckerberg and senior executives knew.

MPs leading the inquiry into fake news have repeatedly tried to summon Zuckerberg to explain the company’s actions. He has repeatedly refused. Collins said this reluctance to testify, plus misleading testimony from an executive at a hearing in February, had forced MPs to explore other options for gathering information about Facebook operations.

“We have very serious questions for Facebook. It misled us about Russian involvement on the platform. And it has not answered our questions about who knew what, when with regards to the Cambridge Analytica scandal,” he said.

“We have followed this court case in America and we believed these documents contained answers to some of the questions we have been seeking about the use of data, especially by external developers.”

The documents seized were obtained during a legal discovery process by Six4Three. It took action against the social media giant after investing $250,000 in an app. Six4Three alleges the cache shows Facebook was not only aware of the implications of its privacy policy, but actively exploited them, intentionally creating andeffectively flagging up the loophole that Cambridge Analytica used to collect data. That raised the interest of Collins and his committee.

A Facebook spokesperson said that Six4Three’s “claims have no merit, and we will continue to defend ourselves vigorously”.

The files are subject to an order of a Californian superior court, so cannot be shared or made public, at risk of being found in contempt of court. Because the MPs’ summons was issued in London where parliament has jurisdiction, it is understood the company founder, although a US citizen, had no choice but to comply. It is understood that Six4Three have informed both the court in California and Facebook’s lawyers.

Facebook said: “The materials obtained by the DCMS committee are subject to a protective order of the San Mateo Superior Court restricting their disclosure. We have asked the DCMS committee to refrain from reviewing them and to return them to counsel or to Facebook. We have no further comment.”

It is unclear what, if any, legal moves Facebook can make to prevent publication. UK, Canada, Ireland, Argentina, Brazil, Singapore and Latvia will all have representatives joining what looks set to be a high-stakes encounter between Facebook and politicians.

Richard Allan, vice-president for policy who will testify at the special session after Zuckerberg declined to attend, said the company takes its responsibility around “a number of important issues around privacy, safety and democracy ... very seriously”.

You may have noticed …

… the free press is under attack. President Trump refuses to condemn those responsible for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. He revoked a CNN reporter’s White House press pass and attacks mainstream media at his mass rallies. The president recently praised a Congressmen for attacking a Guardian reporter. He has accused the American press of being ‘the enemy of the people’.

In 2018, The Guardian broke the story of Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook data breach; we recorded the human fallout from family separations; we charted the rise of the far right, and documented the growing impact of gun violence on Americans’ lives. We reported daily on climate change as a matter of urgent priority.

The Guardian is editorially independent – our journalism is free from commercial bias and not influenced by shareholders or politicians. No one edits our editor. No one steers our opinion. This matters because it enables us to give a voice to those less heard, challenge the powerful and hold them to account. And we don’t have a paywall, meaning The Guardian’s journalism is open and accessible to everyone, regardless of where they live or what they can afford.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... are_btn_tw

Facebook is so afraid of this man it smeared him as both backed by George Soros and anti-Semitic

Meet the founder of "Freedom From Facebook," who was targeted by Definers, the PR firm Facebook hired to discredit its critics.

MERION STATION, Pa. — Facebook has apologized for hiring Washington D.C. hit firm Definers Public Relations as part of a smear campaign against its critics in the wake of the Russia scandal.


In a statement published Wednesday — the day before Thanksgiving — Facebook admitted that it asked Definers to explore potential connections between its critics and billionaire philanthropist George Soros. One of those critics is a group called Freedom From Facebook, founded in March by David Magerman, a philanthropist and technologist who lives in a suburb of Philadelphia.

Magerman founded the group after learning about how the political targeting firm Cambridge Analytica harvested data from more than 50 millions of profiles and friend relationships to power right-wing political campaigns around the globe. Since then, Magerman has been advocating for Congress to break up the company.

“I was inspired by the ease with which they did what they did and the likelihood other people were doing it without being detected,” he said, in an interview with VICE News Tonight on HBO.

Magerman said the purpose of his group is educational, to promote understanding of Facebook. “If people want to be enslaved by technology because they get benefit out of it they can make that choice,” he said. “As an informed choice.”

A New York Times report first detailed Facebook’s campaign to discredit its critics in the wake a string of scandals, including a Russian propaganda campaign that used Facebook to influence the 2016 election. That including hiring Definers, which simultaneously spread false stories that Magerman’s group is backed by Soros, and that Freedom From Facebook is anti-Semitic. Freedom From Facebook is not backed by Soros, though it is part of a larger coalition organizations, some of which do get support from Soros’ Open Society Foundations.


The anti-Semitic smear came after protesters from Freedom From Facebook held up signs depicting Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg as a two headed octopus with its tentacles wrapped around the earth as they testified before Congress last summer.

Magerman, who is Jewish, said the octopus is not a symbol of anti-Semitism, but rather a symbol of monopolistic control. At any rate, Facebook is now apologizing for Definer’s work, and Facebook’s outgoing VP of communications Elliot Schrage took the blame for hiring the company.

Following an earlier claim that she knew nothing about Definers’ work with Facebook, Sandberg admitted Wednesday that she had “received a small number of emails where Definers was referenced,” but said that bringing up the supposed Soros connection wasn’t intended to be anti-Semitic.
https://news.vice.com/amp/en_us/article ... ssion=true

The most explosive moments from Facebook's hearing, where furious lawmakers tore into 'frat-boy billionaire' Mark Zuckerberg
Isobel Asher Hamilton Nov 28, 2018, 6:48 AM
Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Getty
Lawmakers from nine countries tore into Facebook on Tuesday during an international committee hearing in Westminster, London.
Facebook sent its policy chief, Richard Allan, to field questions, but the politicians were more interested in savaging Mark Zuckerberg for failing to show up.
Lawmakers from Britain, Canada, and Argentina went for the jugular, with one saying "frat-boy billionaires from California" were destroying democracy.
Lawmakers from nine countries tore into Facebook on Tuesday after CEO Mark Zuckerberg failed to attend an international committee hearing in Westminster, London.

Instead, Facebook sent its policy chief, Richard Allan, who bore the brunt of the committee's fury during the grueling 165-minute hearing while acknowledging that Zuckerberg's no-show was not a good look.

Not only did lawmakers scold Zuckerberg for his absence, but evidence was brought forward from a cache of Facebook documents the committee seized last week.

Here is a summary of the most explosive moments from the hearing:

Frat-boy billionaires destroying democracy

Canadian MP Charlie Angus kicked things off by asking whose decision it was for Zuckerberg to "blow off" the hearing.

When Allan took responsibility for the decision, Angus upped his rhetoric, painting Facebook as a reckless threat to democracy.

"While we were playing on our phones and apps our democratic institutions, our formal civil conversations, seem to have been upended by frat-boy billionaires from California," he said.

Canada's Bob Zimmer, who set up the International Grand Committee with the UK politician Damian Collins, laid into Zuckerberg for not showing up. "To not have your CEO sit in that chair is an offense to all of us," he said.

At a press conference after the hearing, Collins said "the buck stops with Zuck." Zimmer added: "It's a high-school company collecting adult paychecks."

"To me they don't get it," he said. "I still don't think they get it."

Zuckerberg 'sent his cat'

The lawmakers repeatedly savaged Zuckerberg for not appearing, and likewise, Allan was repeatedly told that he was not senior or knowledgeable enough to answer questions. He acknowledged it was "not great" that he, a member of the UK Parliament himself, was there and not his CEO.

Belgium's Nele Lijnen found the most inventive way to address Zuckerberg's absence.

MarkZuckerberg
The committee left an empty chair for Zuckerberg.
Gabriel Sainhas, House of Commons
"Do you know the expression 'sending your cat'?" she asked, momentarily confusing Allan. She explained that in Flemish, it's an idiom meaning to not show up. This drew laughter, and Allan tried to play along.

"I hope I am able to assist as a cat," Allan said. "No, no, you are sitting next to the cat," she explained.

Blowback from a bikini app

As the hearing went on, details emerged from a cache of Facebook documents that Collins had seized last week. The cache contains potentially explosive internal emails, which Collins obtained by exercising obscure parliamentary privilege on a software-company founder who was on a business trip to the UK.

Ted Kramer is the founder of Six4Three, which is suing Facebook for changing its privacy policy, a move it claims killed its business - an app that scraped Facebook for images of women in bikinis.

Collins said it was "ironic" that the press had described the app, Pikinis, as creepy, given Facebook's origins. This was an apparent allusion to Facemash, a website Zuckerberg made in college that ranked women by their attractiveness. Zuckerberg told Congress in April that Facemash was not Facebook's progenitor.

Read more: How Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg could be humbled by a creepy bikini app

Collins brought the first piece of evidence from the document cache to the table. "An engineer at Facebook notified the company in October 2014 that entities with Russian IP addresses had been using a Pinterest API key to pull over 3 billion data points a day through the Ordered Friends API," he said.

"Was that reported, or was that just kept - as so often seems to be the case - was that just kept in the family and not talked about?" Collins asked.

Allan replied that the information Collins had viewed was "at best partial, at worst misleading." Facebook later clarified that it investigated the engineer's warning and "found no evidence of specific Russian activity."

Ads for data

The second piece of evidence that emerged from the documents concerned Facebook favoring apps that bought substantial amounts of advertising on the platform.

British MP Clive Efford asked whether apps were given a favorable white-listing agreement in exchange for being able "to buy large quantities of mobile advertising through Facebook."

When Allan denied this, Efford replied: "We've seen evidence that suggests that's the case."

Collins has yet to publish any of the documents obtained from Six4Three but has promised he will do so within the week. Throughout the hearing, Allan consistently tried to undermine the papers, saying it was from a "hostile litigant."

Argentina says hurry up and sort out WhatsApp

Leopoldo Moreau, from Argentina's Freedom of Expression Commission, was eager to know what Facebook was planning to do about WhatsApp.

He noted that during the recent Brazilian presidential election, WhatsApp was used to disseminate mass amounts of false information with a political agenda. Argentina has a presidential election coming in 2019.

Allan said Facebook was building WhatsApp into new "election task forces" that he said would monitor whether elections were being interfered with on Facebook's platforms. "You can hurry up, because elections are coming really soon," Moreau replied.

Moreau also pointed out that Argentina had already asked to meet with Facebook after a report from Amnesty International found large account farms making fake identities, but Facebook's Argentine office refused to give an answer and said it would send a Latin American representative - who never showed up.

"I can only apologize," Allan responded.
https://amp.businessinsider.com/faceboo ... ng-2018-11

This Document Is Some Of The Research Facebook Commissioned On George Soros

Definers’ research for Facebook on billionaire George Soros has never been published before. You can read one of those documents here.

Ryan Mac
Posted on December 1, 2018, at 3:59 p.m. ET

Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.
Bloomberg / Getty Images


BuzzFeed News obtained a document Facebook commissioned as research on billionaire George Soros following critical comments the billionaire investor made at the World Economic Forum earlier this year. This report, which you can read below, is at the center of a controversy surrounding Facebook’s previous relationship with a public relations firm that brought Beltway political tactics to the social networking giant.

The document, which is largely innocuous, was assembled by Definers Public Affairs, which was contracted by Facebook for communications consulting and opposition research on competitors and critics, including Soros. It is one of at least two files prepared after Soros appeared onstage in Davos, Switzerland, in January and said Facebook and Google were a “menace” to the world and that the “internet monopolies” did not have the will or inclination to protect society.

As BuzzFeed News reported on Thursday, those comments alarmed Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, who sent an email to a staffer asking them to determine whether Soros, an 88-year-old billionaire investor and philanthropist, had any financial interests related to Facebook. While it is not unusual for companies to conduct research on perceived opponents, and these kinds of documents are fairly standard practice in political circles, they typically aren’t intended for public consumption or meant to be traced back to their sponsors.

Facebook declined to comment for this story.

The current Facebook scandal, triggered by a New York Times story last month that highlighted the company’s internal strife and relationship with a seasoned opposition research firm, threatens to engulf key executives after Facebook’s initial failure to explain what its top two leaders, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Sandberg, knew about Definers and when they knew it. Last month, amid continuing fallout from the Times story, outgoing communications and policy head Elliot Schrage published a note taking responsibility for the Soros research and attributing the reason for the work to the investor’s comments at Davos.

“We researched potential motivations behind George Soros’s criticism of Facebook in January 2018,” a Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News on Thursday. “Mr. Soros is a prominent investor and we looked into his investments and trading activity related to Facebook. That research was already underway when Sheryl sent an email asking if Mr. Soros had shorted Facebook’s stock.”

In the document distributed to reporters in the fall and obtained by BuzzFeed News, Definers highlights Soros’s possible ties to left-leaning advocacy groups that had been critical of Facebook.

“Recently, a number of progressive groups came together to form the Freedom From Facebook campaign which has a six-figure ad budget,” the document reads. “It is not clear who is providing the large amount of funding for the campaign or what their motive is. At least four of the groups in the coalition receive funding or are aligned with George Soros who has publicly criticized Facebook. Neither Freedom From Facebook nor Open Markets Institute have answered questions about who is funding this campaign.”

The document includes headlines and excerpts taken from publicly accessible information including news clippings and blog posts. While it lacks a coherent message, the excerpts and accompanying links were organized under categories such as “GEORGE SOROS CONNECTION.” There is at least one other, longer Definers document involving Soros, according to multiple sources.

Since the publication of the Times’ story, Eddie Vale, a spokesperson and consultant for Freedom From Facebook, said that no money from Soros directly or indirectly had been used to fund the coalition’s work. Axios has also since tracked down the original funder of Freedom From Facebook, identifying that person as Pennsylvania philanthropist and former hedge fund executive David Magerman.

“It’s obvious, yet again, no one can believe their revolving explanations until they release all the emails and research publicly,” Vale told BuzzFeed News on Saturday.

A spokesperson for Soros did not immediately return BuzzFeed News’ request for comment. Matt Stoller, policy director at Open Markets Institute, said that it’s been publicly reported that Open Markets receives money from Soros, but denied any knowledge of Soros funding Freedom From Facebook. BuzzFeed News has reached out to the other organizations mentioned in the document as well, and will update this post should they reply.

“As Facebook has already indicated, the work we do for our clients is always at their request, including this document,” a Definers spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.

The research Definers conducted for Facebook on Soros has never been published before. You can read the document below.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ry ... gc#4ldqpgc

Sheryl Sandberg Emailed Staff To Conduct Research On Billionaire George Soros

While Facebook maintains that Sandberg was not directly involved in a public relations firm's opposition research on Soros, it now acknowledges that she did in fact request research on the billionaire.

Ryan MacNovember 29, 2018, at 9:24 p.m.
Last updated on November 29, 2018, at 10:24 p.m. ET


Jim Watson / AFP / Getty Images
SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg requested research on a perceived company enemy, the billionaire George Soros, according to an internal email described to BuzzFeed News and confirmed by Facebook.

Sandberg has previously said that she was unaware of the work done by Definers Public Affairs, a communications firm that Facebook hired for public relations and opposition research on competitors and critics, including Soros. While Facebook acknowledged its relationship with Definers following a revealing New York Times story, the company has insisted that its two top executives, Sandberg and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, had little, if any, knowledge of the company’s links with the firm or its work.

While a Facebook spokesperson maintains that Sandberg did not direct Definers, it now acknowledges that she did in fact request research on Soros following comments he made at the World Economic Forum in January. During a speech, the billionaire said that Facebook and Google were a "menace" to the world and that the "internet monopolies" did not have the will or inclination to protect society.

"We researched potential motivations behind George Soros's criticism of Facebook in January 2018," a Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. "Mr. Soros is a prominent investor and we looked into his investments and trading activity related to Facebook. That research was already underway when Sheryl sent an email asking if Mr. Soros had shorted Facebook's stock. Sheryl never directed research on Freedom from Facebook. But as she said before she takes full responsibility for any activity that happened on her watch."

George Soros
Herbert Neubauer / AFP / Getty Images
In a call with reporters earlier this month, Zuckerberg said he had never heard of Definers until he read the Times report, echoing a Nov. 15 Facebook post from Sandberg, in which she wrote she “did not know we hired them or about the work they were doing.” In the spring, Definers conducted research on Facebook’s behalf, assembling briefings it later sent to reporters in an attempt to convey Soros’s alleged ties to organizations pushing for the regulation of Facebook, including the Freedom From Facebook coalition.

“We’re no longer working with [Definers] but at the time, they were trying to show that some of the activity against us that appeared to be grassroots also had major organizations behind them,” Sandberg wrote in her Nov. 15 Facebook post. “I have great respect for George Soros — and the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories against him are abhorrent.”

The email described to BuzzFeed News, however, shows that Sandberg was actively involved in looking into Soros and his possible financial motivations.

Help us break more news on tech’s most powerful people. Become a BuzzFeed News member.

Soros, who has donated to liberal political causes and candidates, has become a favorite target of conspiracy theorists, conservatives, and even President Donald Trump, who baselessly accused the billionaire of paying protesters during Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearings to the Supreme Court in October. Some of the attacks on Soros have been anti-Semitic, focusing on his past as a Holocaust survivor. Last month, a man, allegedly influenced by the conspiracy theories he’d seen about Soros online, sent a bomb to the 88-year-old’s home in Westchester, New York.

In an interview with CBS This Morning two days after the Times story revealed Definers’ work for Facebook, Sandberg doubled down on her earlier denial, noting that Definers was one of “lots of firms” hired by the social networking giant.

“I learned of that in the paper yesterday as well when Mark did,” she said. “And they're gone and we're looking into what happened there. I don't have full details. But I will say that if there was anything that, you know, inadvertently or advertently played into any anti-Semitic attacks on anyone, that's a problem.”


Last week, Facebook’s outgoing head of communications and policy Elliot Schrage published a note taking blame for the hiring of Definers in 2017. In it, Schrage also confirmed that Facebook had hired Definers to investigate Soros and its competitors, noting that the firm “helped us respond to unfair claims where Facebook [has] been singled out for criticism.”

“In January 2018, investor and philanthropist George Soros attacked Facebook in a speech at Davos, calling us a ‘menace to society,’” Schrage, who is on the board of the Holocaust Museum, wrote. “We had not heard such criticism from him before and wanted to determine if he had any financial motivation. Definers researched this using public information.”

In an addendum to that note, Sandberg also had a small update, noting that while she “didn’t remember a firm called Definers,” her team later found evidence that its work was “incorporated into materials presented to me and I received a small number of emails where Definers was referenced.”

Eddie Vale, a spokesperson and consultant for Freedom From Facebook, said that in light of Sandberg's shifting positions, Facebook could not be trusted on the matter. He also told BuzzFeed News that no money from Soros directly or indirectly had been used to fund the coalition's work.

“In light of Sandberg's continuously changing story on the Soros research there's no way their denials about attacking other critics can be taken at face value,” he said. “Facebook must immediately release any emails about, and the research itself, targeting the Freedom From Facebook coalition or any member organizations.”

Sandberg, who manages Facebook’s communications team among other responsibilities, has come under immense pressure since the Times story, which depicts the 49-year-old as a fulcrum for poor decisions and infighting. In a Bloomberg News report, unnamed sources placed the blame for Facebook’s recent woes at the feet of Sandberg, who they say prioritized her own personal brand and entrusted the wrong people, among them Schrage and Facebook vice president of public policy Joel Kaplan.

With reporting by Mat Honan

UPDATE

The story had been updated with comment from a Freedom From Facebook spokesperson.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ry ... ers-george

Carole Cadwalladr
@carolecadwalla
BREAKING: Here are the documents Facebook didn't want you to see. Just released by parliament. Judge for yourself why.
https://www.parliament.uk/documents/com ... 4Three.pdf

EFEFF857-D269-4C11-909B-70455D445B7E.jpeg

https://mobile.twitter.com/carolecadwalla

Facebook Allowed Some Tech Companies To Read And Delete Users’ Private Messages

Since 2010, the tech giant has reportedly granted over 150 companies deeper access to users’ personal data than it has admitted.

Dominique Mosbergen

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress in April. The tech giant’s privacy policies have been under scrutiny for months.
Facebook reportedly gave some of the world’s largest tech companies access to users’ personal data, including allowing some firms to read and delete users’ private messages and obtain contact information through their friends, without users’ knowledge or consent.

The New York Times on Tuesday detailed how Facebook, through data-sharing “business partnerships,” shared and traded user data with more than 150 companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify, Yahoo and the Russian search engine Yandex.

These partnerships, the oldest of which dates to 2010 and all of which were active in 2017, “effectively exempt[ed] those business partners” from Facebook’s usual privacy rules, the Times reported, citing hundreds of pages of internal Facebook documents.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine, for example, was reportedly allowed to see the names of nearly all Facebook users’ friends without their consent; Spotify, Netflix and the Royal Bank of Canada were able to read, write and delete users’ private messages; and Amazon, Microsoft and Sony could obtain users’ contact information through their friends.

Yahoo and Yandex reportedly retained access to Facebook user data even after such access was supposed to have been halted. And Facebook gave Apple the power to see Facebook users’ contacts and calendar entries even in cases where users had disabled all data sharing.

In all, the data of “hundreds of millions of people” were sought monthly by applications made by these Facebook business partners, according to the Times. Some of these partnerships reportedly remain in effect today.


Responding to the Times’ report, Facebook, whose privacy policies have come under intense scrutiny in recent months, said it had neither violated users’ privacy agreements nor a deal with the Federal Trade Commission that made it illegal for the social network to share user data without explicit consent.

“None of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without people’s permission, nor did they violate our 2012 settlement with the FTC,” Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Facebook’s director of developer platforms and programs, said in a Tuesday blog post.

Facebook’s primary argument was that it did not need explicit consent from users because its business partners, which it refers to as “integration partners,” were “functionally extensions of Facebook itself,” Times reporter Nick Confessore explained.



Still, Facebook acknowledged that it’s “got work to do to regain people’s trust.”

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“Protecting people’s information requires stronger teams, better technology, and clearer policies, and that’s where we’ve been focused for most of 2018,” Steve Satterfield, Facebook’s director of privacy and public policy, said in a statement, noting that partnerships “are one area of focus.”

Papamiltiadis said most of the features described in the Times’ article are “now gone.”


At least two U.S. senators have called for more federal oversight in the wake of the Times report.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) lambasted Facebook’s reported data sharing as “unacceptable” and called for Congress to pass the data privacy bill that she and Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisana introduced in April.


Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said he was angered by the report.

“It has never been more clear. We need a federal privacy law. They are never going to volunteer to do the right thing. The FTC needs to be empowered to oversee big tech,” he tweeted.



An early investor of Facebook told the Times that “no one should trust Facebook until they change their business model.”

“I don’t believe it is legitimate to enter into data-sharing partnerships where there is not prior informed consent from the user,” Roger McNamee said.

Facebook did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fa ... b99058dd3a

These Ex-Spies Are Harvesting Facebook Photos For A Massive Facial Recognition Database

Thomas BrewsterForbes Staff
Security
I cover crime, privacy and security in digital and physical forms.

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, appeared for a hearing with the House Energy and Commerce Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building on Wednesday April 11, 2018 in Washington, DC. He wasn’t pushed on surveillance companies operating on the platform. (Photo by Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
When Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica revelations, he tried to describe the difference between “surveillance and what we do.” “The difference is extremely clear,” a nervous-looking Zuckerberg said. “On Facebook, you have control over your information… the information we collect you can choose to have us not collect.”


But not a single member of the committee pushed the billionaire CEO about surveillance companies who exploit the data on Facebook for profit. Forbes has uncovered one case that might shock them: over the last five years a secretive surveillance company founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer has been quietly building a massive facial recognition database consisting of faces acquired from the giant social network, YouTube and countless other websites. Privacy activists are suitably alarmed.

That database forms the core of a facial recognition service called Face-Int, now owned by Israeli vendor Verint after it snapped up the product’s creator, little-known surveillance company Terrogence, in 2017. Both Verint and Terrogence have long been vendors for the U.S. government, providing bleeding-edge spy tech to the NSA, the U.S. Navy and countless other intelligence and security agencies.


As described on the Terrogence website, the database consists of facial profiles of thousands of suspects “harvested from such online sources as YouTube, Facebook and open and closed forums all over the globe.” Those faces were extracted from as many as 35,000 videos and photos of terrorist training camps, motivational clips and terror attacks. That same marketing page was online in 2013, according to internet archive the Wayback Machine, indicating the product is at least five years old. The age of the product also suggests far more than 35,000 videos and photos have been raided by the Face-Int technology by now, though Terrogence co-founder and research lead Shai Arbel declined to comment for this article.

Raising the stakes of facial recognition

Though Terrogence is primarily focused on helping intelligence agencies and law enforcement fight terrorism online, LinkedIn profiles of current and former employees indicate it’s also involved in other, more political endeavours. One ex-staffer, in describing her role as a Terrogence analyst, said she’d “conducted public perception management operations on behalf of foreign and domestic governmental clients,” and used “open source intelligence practices and social media engineering methods to investigate political and social groups.” She was not reachable at the time of publication.


And now concerns have been raised over just how Terrogence has grabbed all those faces from Facebook and other online sources. What’s apparent, though, is that Terrogence is yet another company that’s been able to clandestinely take advantage of Facebook’s openness, on top of Cambridge Analytica, which acquired information on as many as 87 million users in 2014 from U.K.-based researcher Aleksandr Kogan to help target individuals during its work for the Donald Trump and Ted Cruz presidential campaigns.

“It raises the stakes of face recognition – it intensifies the potential negative consequences,” warned Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “When you contemplate face recognition that’s everywhere, we have to think about what that’s going to mean for us. If private companies are scraping photos and combining them with personal info in order to make judgements about people – are you a terrorist, or how likely are you to be a shoplifter or anything in between – then it exposes everyone to the risk of being misidentified, or correctly identified and being misjudged.”

Jennifer Lynch, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that if the facial recognition database had been shared with the US government, it would threaten the free speech and privacy rights of social media users.

“Applying face recognition accurately to video is extremely challenging, and we know that face recognition performs poorly with people of color and especially with women and those with darker skin tones,” Lynch told Forbes. “Combining these two known problems with face recognition, there is a high chance this technology would regularly misidentify people as terrorists or criminals.


“This could impact the travel and civil rights of tens of thousands of law-abiding travelers who would then have to prove they are not the terrorist or criminal the system has identified them to be.”

It’s unclear just how the Face-Int product acquires faces, though it appears similar to a project run by the NSA, as revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2014, where the intelligence agency had gathered 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” from the web back by 2011. Co-founder Arbel, a former intelligence officer with the Israeli military, declined to respond to questions about how the tech works, though he described Face-Int as “amazing” in a text message and confirmed it continues to operate under Verint.

A spokesperson for Facebook, which employs its own facial recognition tech to help identify users’ visages in photos across the platform, said it appeared Terrogence’s product would violate its policies, including one that prohibits the use of data grabbed from the social network to provide tools for surveillance. Facebook also doesn’t allow accessing or collecting information via automated methods, such as harvesting bots or scrapers. The spokesperson noted that it hadn’t found any Facebook apps operated by the company.

A social media monitor

There’s no evidence America has purchased Face-Int. But it has benefitted from other intelligence services built by Terrogence. The vendor has scored at least two contracts with the U.S. government, both with the U.S. Navy and worth a total of $148,000, according to public records. The contracts, one from 2014 the other signed off in 2015, were for subscriptions to the company’s Mobius and TGAlertS products.

Mobius consists of reports on the latest trends in terrorists’ improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and their tactics. The reports are based on intel gathered from various social media platforms “where global terrorists seek to recruit, radicalize and plot their next attack,” according to a company brochure. TGAlertS, meanwhile, provides “near real-time” information on urgent issues uncovered by Terrogence staff trawling the web.

Those employees gather information in part through fake profiles. As another brochure put it, they “elicit information by carefully guiding online discussion, often drumming up interest and facilitating communication by employing multiple virtual entities in a single operation.”

This is far from Arbel’s first rodeo in the surveillance industrial complex: he co-founded SenseCy, which was acquired by Verint in 2017. It too sets up “virtual entities” to gather intelligence. “Perfected over many years of practice, SenseCy operates dozens of virtual entities combine strong, believable cover stories with well-perfected web interaction methodologies, and are sourcing invaluable intelligence from all relevant web platforms,” a blurb on its site currently reads. The company appears to be more focused on cybersecurity protection than government surveillance, however.

The privatization of blacklists

If Terrogence isn’t solely focused on terrorism, but has a political side to its business too, its facial recognition work could sweep up a vast number of people. That brings up another particularly worrying aspect of the business in which Terrogence operates: the dawn of “the privatisation of blacklisting,” warned Stanley. “We’ve been fighting with the government for years over due process on those lists… people being put on them without being told why and not being sure how those lists are being used,” he told Forbes.


“A lot of those problems could intensify if you have a bunch of private quasi-vigilantes making their own blacklists of all kinds.” Just earlier this month, Verint launched what appeared to be an entirely separate facial recognition product, FaceDetect. It promises to identify individuals “regardless of face obstructions, suspect ageing, disguises and ethnicity” and “allows operators to instantaneously add suspects to watch-lists.”

But Stanley also questioned Facebook’s policies on user control of profile photos. The social network has the largest collection of faces in the world, and yet profile pictures, to an extent, can’t be entirely locked down, he said. A Facebook spokesperson said profile photos are always public but it’s possible to adjust the privacy settings of previous profile snaps to limit who can see them.

Privacy advocacy groups like the ACLU now want to see users given more control over those images. Given the recent furore surrounding Cambridge Analytica, such changes might come sooner rather than later.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrew ... ssion=true

Facebook Shuts Hundreds of Russia-Linked Pages, Accounts
January 17, 2019 2:20 PM
FILE - This March 29, 2018, photo shows the logo for Facebook on screens at the Nasdaq MarketSite, in New York's Times Square.
Facebook said Thursday it removed hundreds of Russia-linked pages, groups and accounts that it says were part of two big disinformation operations, in its latest effort to fight fake news.

The social media company said it took action after finding two networks "that engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior" on its Facebook and Instagram platforms.

Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said in a blog post that one network operated in countries in Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltics, Central Asia and the Caucasus. The other focused on Ukraine.

The people running the accounts represented themselves as independent news sources and posted on topics like anti-NATO sentiment and protest movements.

"We didn't find any links between these operations, but they used similar tactics by creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they were and what they were doing," Gleicher said.

Gleicher said one network of 364 pages and accounts was linked to employees of Sputnik, a Russian state-run English-language news site. About 790,000 accounts followed one or more of the network's pages. The operation spent about $135,000 over six years for Facebook advertisements, which it paid for in euros, rubles and dollars. The most recent ad ran in January.

Sputnik criticized Facebook's takedown.

"The decision is clearly political. This is tantamount to censorship," it said in a statement to the AP, adding that Facebook blocked the accounts of seven of its bureaus in former Soviet republics. "Sputnik editorial offices deal with news and they do it well. If this blocking is Facebook's only reaction to the quality of the media's work, then we have no questions, everything is clear here. But there is still hope that common sense will prevail."

Acting on a tip from U.S. law enforcement, Facebook shut another 148 pages, groups and accounts, including 41 on Instagram, that were part of a second network that spent $25,000 on ads in 2018, paid for in rubles. Gleicher said Facebook "identified some technical overlap with Russia-based activity we saw prior to the U.S. midterm elections, including behavior that shared characteristics with previous Internet Research Agency activity."

The Internet Research Agency is a Russian troll farm indicted by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller for its actions aimed at influencing the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The disclosure is the latest in a series of fake account purges in recent months. Facebook has been stepping up its scrutiny after being criticized for its slow response to foreign attempts to influence the 2016 vote.

In another measure aimed at increasing transparency, Facebook last year started requiring all political ads taken out in the U.S., Britain and Brazil to disclose who paid for them.
https://www.voanews.com/amp/facebook-sh ... ssion=true

Belligerent Savant » Sat Jan 19, 2019 8:21 pm wrote:.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/book ... alism.html

THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM
The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
By Shoshana Zuboff
691 pp. PublicAffairs. $38

How Tech Companies Manipulate Our Personal Data

Facebook Moves to Block Ad Transparency Tools — Including Ours

Our tool had let the public see exactly how users were being targeted by advertisers. The social media giant urged us to shut it down last year.

by Jeremy B. Merrill, special to ProPublica, and Ariana Tobin
Jan. 28, 4:29 p.m. EST

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook Inc. at the Viva Tech start-up and technology gathering on May 24, 2018 in Paris, France. (Christophe Morin/IP3/Getty Images)
A number of organizations, including ProPublica, have developed tools to let the public see exactly how Facebook users are being targeted by advertisers.

Now, Facebook has quietly made changes to its site that stop those efforts.

ProPublica, Mozilla and Who Targets Me have all noticed their tools stopped working this month after Facebook inserted code in its website that blocks them.

“This is very concerning,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who has co-sponsored the Honest Ads Act, which would require transparency on Facebook ads. “Investigative groups like ProPublica need access to this information in order to track and report on the opaque and frequently deceptive world of online advertising.”

For the past year and a half, ProPublica has been building a searchable database of political ads and the segments of the population advertisers are paying to reach. We did this by enlisting thousands of volunteers who installed a web browser extension. The tool shared the ads users see as well as Facebook’s details on why the users were targeted.

In a statement to ProPublica, Facebook said the change was meant to simply enforce its terms of service. (The Guardian also published a story Sunday flagging the change.)

“We regularly improve the ways we prevent unauthorized access by third parties like web browser plugins to keep people’s information safe,” Facebook spokesperson Beth Gautier said. “This was a routine update and applied to ad blocking and ad scraping plugins, which can expose people’s information to bad actors in ways they did not expect.”

Facebook has made minor tweaks before that broke our tool. But this time, Facebook blocked the ability to automatically pull ad targeting information.

The latest move comes a few months after Facebook executives urged ProPublica to shut down its ad transparency project. In August, Facebook ads product management director Rob Leathern acknowledged ProPublica’s project “serves an important purpose.” But he said, “We’re going to start enforcing on the existing terms of service that we have.” He said Facebook would soon “transition” ProPublica away from its tool.

Facebook has launched an archive of American political ads, which the company says is an alternative to ProPublica’s tool. However, Facebook’s ad archive is only available in three countries, fails to disclose important targeting data and doesn’t even include all political ads run in the U.S.

Our tool regularly caught political ads that aren’t reflected in Facebook’s archive. Just this month, we noticed four groups running ads that haven’t been in Facebook’s archive:

the National Rifle Association

an electoral reform advocacy group targeting Bernie Sanders supporters

a local anti-corruption group and

a union advertising to Democrats about health care policy.

After we contacted Facebook, the company canceled the ads and said it is “investigating why these particular ads weren’t classified as political so we can learn and update our protocols.”

Journalists in other countries — including those with impending elections like Canada, Ukraine, Guatemala and Israel — currently have no way to track political ads or targeting information. Facebook announced Monday that it plans to expand its archive to those countries this year and will debut a global tool “by the end of June.”

Facebook’s archive doesn’t disclose the targeting advertisers do by racial, ethnic, religious, partisan and other sensitive attributes. Some of those microtargeting categories have been used to affect the political process: For instance, Russian agents targeted many African-Americans during the 2016 election.

In an email, Facebook said it doesn’t plan to disclose sensitive targeting categories in its archive because doing so “could expose people’s information.” It didn’t elaborate on how that might happen.

The proposed Honest Ads Act, which is expected to be re-introduced in Congress this year, would require Facebook to publish “a description of the audience targeted by the advertisement.”

Facebook has also developed another tool that it says will allow researchers to analyze political ads more easily. That tool, called an API, is in “beta” and restricted to a few participants, including ProPublica, who had to sign a nondisclosure agreement about the data it provided.

One researcher with access said the API is not sufficient. It only allows searching by keyword, said Laura Edelson, a researcher at New York University who studies online political advertising. “You can only find ads about things that you already know you’re looking for,” Edelson said. “So any kind of emerging activity is potentially undiscoverable.”

What it all adds up to, said Knight First Amendment Institute senior attorney Alex Abdo, is “we cannot trust Facebook to be the gatekeeper to the information the public needs about Facebook.”

Here are the details of how our tool worked and what Facebook has done:

All Facebook users can find details about how they’re being targeted by clicking through a series of options on the site. Our tool, the Political Ad Collector, automated the process. Every time one of our over 16,000 participants in crowdsourcing project scrolled past an ad like this one ...


... our extension automatically captured the text and related picture. It also opened the ellipses on the top right of the ad, which leads to this menu:


From there, it read the information contained in “Why Am I Seeing This” and copied that to the database as well:


We have collected more than 100,000 political ads in this way. But Facebook’s latest update blocks tools like ours from clicking on the “Why Am I Seeing This” menu.

The company added code that prevents clicks generated by computers — including browser extensions — on just that one button. Web browsers make a distinction between a click generated by the computer and one generated by your mouse. Clicks from your mouse are marked “isTrusted“ and those generated by computer code are not.

Facebook pointed out that other options, besides seeing the explanation for an ad’s targeting, exist behind that menu, like the ability to hide an ad or report it.

Facebook’s site does not make such a distinction between user or computer-generated clicks on other behaviors that have been abused by bad actors. For example, it is still possible to automatically like a page, watch a video or click through on an ad — loopholes exploited by bots and misinformation campaigns attempting to gain credibility or turn a profit.

When we asked Facebook why it does not use a similar filtering mechanism on other parts of the platform, it said it prevents “bot-like behavior” in other ways, including a collaboration with an effort to help take down an ad fraud ring.

This is not the first time Facebook has changed its code in a way that has broken our tool. For example, all ads are supposed to contain the word “sponsored” as part of a mandatory disclosure, so users can distinguish between ads and their friends’ posts. Our tool recognized ads by searching for that word. Last year, Facebook added invisible letters to the HTML code of the site. So, to a computer, the word registered as “SpSonSsoSredS.” Later, it also added an invisible “Sponsored” disclosure to posts from your friends. Many of the participants in our project noticed the effects of this change because it caused some menus to pop open unexpectedly or the page to scroll to the top repeatedly. Nowadays, the disclosure says “SpSpSononSsosoSredredSSS.” Some of these changes were likely also intended to thwart ad blockers.

Here's what the change looks like in the JavaScript code:

__d("AdsPrefsXout",
["cx","AdsTransparencyEvent","AdsTransparencyProduct","AdsTransparencyTypedLogger","AdsTransparencyXoutEvent","AdsTransparencyXoutProduct","AdsTransparencyXoutTypedLogger","DOM","EntstreamFeedObject","EventListener","ge"],
(function(a,b,c,d,e,f,g){
"use strict";
__p&&__p();
a = {
registerDropdownClick: function(a,c){
b("EventListener").listen(
a,
"click",
function(){
new(b("AdsTransparencyXoutTypedLogger"))().setEvent(b("AdsTransparencyXoutEvent").USER_ENGAGEMENT).setAdID(c).setProduct(b("AdsTransparencyXoutProduct").AD_DROPDOWN_BUTTON).log()})
},
registerDirectHideClick: function(a,c,d){b("EventListener").listen(a,"click",function(){new(b("AdsTransparencyXoutTypedLogger"))().setEvent(b("AdsTransparencyXoutEvent").USER_ENGAGEMENT).setAdID(c).setProduct(b("AdsTransparencyXoutProduct").AD_DIRECT_HIDE_BUTTON).log();
var e=b("DOM").create("div",{className:"_5lum"}),f=b("EntstreamFeedObject").getHscrollOuterRootIfAvailable(b("EntstreamFeedObject").getRoot(b("ge")(d)));
b("DOM").appendContent(e,a.getAttribute("data-action-in-progress-string"));
b("DOM").insertBefore(f.firstChild,e)})},
registerNuxDropdownClick:function(a,c){b("EventListener").listen(a,"click",function(){new(b("AdsTransparencyXoutTypedLogger"))().setEvent(b("AdsTransparencyXoutEvent").USER_ENGAGEMENT).setAdID(c).setProduct(b("AdsTransparencyXoutProduct").NUX_AD_BUTTON).log()})},
blockScriptClicks: function(a,c){
__p&&__p();
var d=!1;
b("EventListener").capture(a,"click",function(a){if(a.isTrusted===!1){
a.preventDefault();
a.stopPropagation();
if(d)return;
new(b("AdsTransparencyTypedLogger"))().setAdID(c).setEvent(b("AdsTransparencyEvent").ACTION_BLOCKED).setProduct(b("AdsTransparencyProduct").FEED_UNIT_CHEVRON_BUTTON).log();d=!0}})
}
};
e.exports=a
})
,null);
The same new section of code that blocks our tool also sends a “log event” to Facebook, noting when an ad transparency tool is detected. Facebook says the change is meant to document “what percent of the traffic was from plugins that identify content without our permission versus Facebook users checking [Why am I seeing this] manually."
https://www.propublica.org/article/face ... ign=buffer

German Regulators Just Outlawed Facebook's Whole Ad Business


Andreas Mundt, the head of Germany's antitrust regulator, says Facebook can no longer "force its users to agree to the practically unrestricted collection and assigning of non-Facebook data to their Facebook user accounts."
Rolf Vennenbernd/Getty Images

Facebook’s massively lucrative advertising model relies on tracking its one billion users—as well as the billions on WhatsApp and Instagram—across the web and smartphone apps, collecting data on which sites and apps they visit, where they shop, what they like, and combining all that information into comprehensive user profiles. Facebook has maintained that collecting all this data allows the company to serve ads that are more relevant to users’ interests. Privacy advocates have argued that the company isn’t transparent enough about what data it has and what it does with it. As a result, most people don’t understand the massive trade-off they are making with their information when they sign up for the “free” site.

On Thursday, Germany’s Federal Cartel Office, the country’s antitrust regulator, ruled that Facebook was exploiting consumers by requiring them to agree to this kind of data collection in order to have an account, and has prohibited the practice going forward.

“Facebook will no longer be allowed to force its users to agree to the practically unrestricted collection and assigning of non-Facebook data to their Facebook user accounts,” FCO president Andreas Mundt said in a statement announcing the decision.

“We disagree with their conclusions and intend to appeal so that people in Germany continue to benefit fully from all our services,” Facebook wrote in a blog post responding to the ruling. The company has one month to appeal. If it fails, Facebook would have to change how it processes data internally for German users, and could only combine the data into a single profile for a Facebook account with that user's explicit consent.

“When there is a lack of competition, users accepting terms of service are often not truly consenting. The consent is a fiction.”
Lina Khan, Open Markets
“This is significant,” says Lina Khan, an antitrust expert affiliated with Columbia Law School and the think tank Open Markets. She notes that authorities haven’t done a good job of articulating why privacy is an antitrust issue. Here, the German regulator makes it clear. “The FCO’s theory is that Facebook’s dominance is what allows it to impose on users contractual terms that require them to allow Facebook to track them all over,” Khan says. “When there is a lack of competition, users accepting terms of service are often not truly consenting. The consent is a fiction.”

According to the FCO, Facebook had 32 million monthly active users in Germany at the end of last year, amounting to a market share of more than 80 percent. The regulator argues this dominance gives it jurisdiction to oversee the company’s data collection practices.

“As a dominant company Facebook is subject to special obligations under competition law. In the operation of its business model the company must take into account that Facebook users practically cannot switch to other social networks,” said Mundt. “The only choice the user has is either to accept the comprehensive combination of data or to refrain from using the social network. In such a difficult situation the user’s choice cannot be referred to as voluntary consent.”

The FCO further argues that Facebook used its vast data collection to build up its market dominance, creating a feedback loop wherein people have no choice but to use the site and allow it to track them, which makes the site even more dominant and entrenches its privacy violations.

“The Bundeskartellamt [FCO] underestimates the fierce competition we face in Germany, misinterprets our compliance with GDPR and undermines the mechanisms European law provides for ensuring consistent data protection standards across the EU,” Facebook wrote in response to the ruling. They cite Snapchat, Twitter, and YouTube as direct competitors, hoping to illustrate that there isn’t lack of competition, and therefore the FCO has no standing to apply rules based on Facebook’s dominance. “Popularity,” they write, “is not dominance.”

The FCO disagreed, explaining that Snapchat, YouTube, and Twitter serve totally different functions from Facebook, and therefore can’t be seen as viable alternatives to the service.

Antitrust regulators used to consider data and privacy outside their purview. The old philosophy held that antitrust was concerned with price, and if a product was free then consumers couldn’t be harmed, says Maurice Stucke, antitrust expert and law professor at the University of Tennessee. “What we’re seeing now is those myths are being largely discredited.”

The most remarkable part of the ruling is the way it makes clear that privacy and competition are inextricably intertwined. “On the one hand there is a service provided to users free of charge. On the other hand, the attractiveness and value of the advertising spaces increase with the amount and detail of user data,” Mundt said. “It is therefore precisely in the area of data collection and data use where Facebook, as a dominant company, must comply with the rules and laws applicable in Germany and Europe.”

“This is the first instance where [regulators] are saying that because [a company has] such market power that consent is not freely given,” says Stucke.

The FCO ruling explains that the harm to users from Facebook’s data collection is not in cost but in “loss of control.” “They are no longer able to control how their personal data are used. They cannot perceive which data from which sources are combined for which purposes with data from Facebook accounts and used e.g. for creating user profiles,” the FAQ on the ruling reads. That combining of data gives it a “significance the user cannot foresee.”

That fact is underscored by people’s ignorance of Facebook data practices. Roughly 74 percent of American Facebook users surveyed recently by the Pew Charitable Trusts did not know that Facebook maintained profiles about their interests. Fifty-one percent of those surveyed said they weren’t comfortable with the practice.

But Facebook says that tracking people makes the services safer and better, and that the FCO misses how much the company has done in order to comply with the General Data Protection regulation passed by the European Union in 2018.

The FCO’s ruling, however, directly addresses the GDPR, writing that under its principles Facebook has “no effective justification for collecting data from other company-owned services and Facebook Business Tools or for assigning these data to the Facebook user accounts.” (Facebook Business Tools here can be anything from the Like and Share buttons that appear all over the internet, and which allow Facebook to track you on sites it doesn’t own, to analytic tools Facebook provides businesses.) In other words, in addition to being anticompetitive in its view, the FCO believes Facebook hasn’t proven that data collection and bundling is in the best interest of every consumer and that its sites couldn’t function without it.

If Facebook loses the appeal, then Germany will become a grand experiment in whether the surveillance economy is actually essential to the operation of social media. Other Europeans and Americans may demand they are given the same option. “This ruling is really an icebreaker. Icebreakers break through the ice in order to lead the path for other vessels to follow,” says Stucke.
https://www.wired.com/story/germany-fac ... st-ruling/

Facebook uses its apps to track users it thinks could threaten employees and offices

Salvador Rodriguez9:05 AM ET Wed, 30 Jan 2019 | 01:10
Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg
Matt McClain | The Washington Post | Getty Images

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg

In early 2018, a Facebook user made a public threat on the social network against one of the company's offices in Europe.

Facebook picked up the threat, pulled the user's data and determined he was in the same country as the office he was targeting. The company informed the authorities about the threat and directed its security officers to be on the lookout for the user.

"He made a veiled threat that 'Tomorrow everyone is going to pay' or something to that effect," a former Facebook security employee told CNBC.

The incident is representative of the steps Facebook takes to keep its offices, executives and employees protected, according to more than a dozen former Facebook employees who spoke with CNBC. The company mines its social network for threatening comments, and in some cases uses its products to track the location of people it believes present a credible threat.

Several of the former employees questioned the ethics of Facebook's security strategies, with one of them calling the tactics "very Big Brother-esque."

Other former employees argue these security measures are justified by Facebook's reach and the intense emotions it can inspire. The company has 2.7 billion users across its services. That means that if just 0.01 percent of users make a threat, Facebook is still dealing with 270,000 potential security risks.

"Our physical security team exists to keep Facebook employees safe," a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. "They use industry-standard measures to assess and address credible threats of violence against our employees and our company, and refer these threats to law enforcement when necessary. We have strict processes designed to protect people's privacy and adhere to all data privacy laws and Facebook's terms of service. Any suggestion our onsite physical security team has overstepped is absolutely false."

Facebook is unique in the way it uses its own product to mine data for threats and locations of potentially dangerous individuals, said Tim Bradley, senior consultant with Incident Management Group, a corporate security consulting firm that deals with employee safety issues. However, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's general duty clause says that companies have to provide their employees with a workplace free of hazards that could cause death or serious physical harm, Bradley said.

"If they know there's a threat against them, they have to take steps," Bradley said. "How they got the information is secondary to the fact that they have a duty to protect employees."

Making the list

One of the tools Facebook uses to monitor threats is a "be on lookout" or "BOLO" list, which is updated approximately once a week. The list was created in 2008, an early employee in Facebook's physical security group told CNBC. It now contains hundreds of people, according to four former Facebook security employees who have left the company since 2016.

Facebook notifies its security professionals anytime a new person is added to the BOLO list, sending out a report that includes information about the person, such as their name, photo, their general location and a short description of why they were added.

In recent years, the security team even had a large monitor that displayed the faces of people on the list, according to a photo CNBC has seen and two people familiar, although Facebook says it no longer operates this monitor.

Other companies keep similar lists of threats, Bradley and other sources said. But Facebook is unique because it can use its own products to identify these threats and track the location of people on the list.

Users who publicly threaten the company, its offices or employees — including posting threatening comments in response to posts from executives like CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg — are often added to the list. These users are typically described as making "improper communication" or "threatening communication," according to former employees.

The bar can be pretty low. While some users end up on the list after repeated appearances on company property or long email threats, others might find themselves on the BOLO list for saying something as simple as "F--- you, Mark," "F--- Facebook" or "I'm gonna go kick your a--," according to a former employee who worked with the executive protection team. A different former employee who was on the company's security team said there were no clearly communicated standards to determine what kinds of actions could land somebody on the list, and that decisions were often made on a case-by-case basis.

The Facebook spokesman disputed this, saying that people were only added after a "rigorous review to determine the validity of the threat."

Awkward situations

Most people on the list do not know they're on it. This sometimes leads to tense situations.

Several years ago, one Facebook user discovered he was on the BOLO list when he showed up to Facebook's Menlo Park campus for lunch with a friend who worked there, according to a former employee who witnessed the incident.

The user checked in with security to register as a guest. His name popped up right away, alerting security. He was on the list. His issue had to do with messages he had sent to Zuckerberg, according to a person familiar with the circumstances.

Soon, more security guards showed up in the entrance area where the guest had tried to register. No one grabbed the individual, but security guards stood at his sides and at each of the doors leading in and out of that entrance area.

Eventually, the employee showed up mad and demanded that his friend be removed from the BOLO list. After the employee met with Facebook's global security intelligence and investigations team, the friend was removed from the list — a rare occurrence.

"No person would be on BOLO without credible cause," the Facebook spokesman said in regard to this incident.

The Facebook campus in Menlo Park, California.
Noah Berger | Reuters

The Facebook campus in Menlo Park, California.

It's not just users who find themselves on Facebook's BOLO list. Many of the people on the list are former Facebook employees and contractors, whose colleagues ask to add them when they leave the company.

Some former employees are listed for having a track record of poor behavior, such as stealing company equipment. But in many cases, there is no reason listed on the BOLO description. Three people familiar said that almost every Facebook employee who gets fired is added to the list, and one called the process "really subjective." Another said that contractors are added if they get emotional when their contracts are not extended.

The Facebook spokesman countered that the process is more rigorous than these people claim. "Former employees are only added under very specific circumstances, after review by legal and HR, including threats of violence or harassment."

The practice of adding former employees to the BOLO list has occasionally created awkward situations for the company's recruiters, who often reach out to former employees to fill openings. Ex-employees have showed up for job interviews only to find out that they couldn't enter because they were on the BOLO list, said a former security employee who left the company last year.

"It becomes a whole big embarrassing situation," this person said.

Tracked by special request

Facebook has the capability to track BOLO users' whereabouts by using their smartphone's location data collected through the Facebook app, or their IP address collected through the company's website.

Facebook only tracks BOLO-listed users when their threats are deemed credible, according to a former employee with firsthand knowledge of the company's security procedures. This could include a detailed threat with an exact location and timing of an attack, or a threat from an individual who makes a habit of attending company events, such as the Facebook shareholders' meeting. This former employee emphasized Facebook could not look up users' locations without cause.

When a credible threat is detected, the global security operations center and the global security intelligence and investigations units make a special request to the company's information security team, which has the capabilities to track users' location information. In some cases, the tracking doesn't go very far -- for instance, if a BOLO user made a threat about a specific location but their current location shows them nowhere close, the tracking might end there.

But if the BOLO user is nearby, the information security team can continue to monitor their location periodically and keep other security teams on alert.

Depending on the threat, Facebook's security teams can take other actions, such as stationing security guards, escorting a BOLO user off campus or alerting law enforcement.

street sign reading 'Hacker Way' is seen in the parking lot of the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
Robyn Beck | AFP | Getty Images

street sign reading 'Hacker Way' is seen in the parking lot of the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

Facebook's information security team has tracked users' locations in other safety-related instances, too.

In 2017, a Facebook manager alerted the company's security teams when a group of interns she was managing did not log into the company's systems to work from home. They had been on a camping trip, according to a former Facebook security employee, and the manager was concerned about their safety.

Facebook's information security team became involved in the situation and used the interns' location data to try and find out if they were safe. "They call it 'pinging them', pinging their Facebook accounts," the former security employee recalled.

After the location data did not turn up anything useful, the information security team then kept digging and learned that the interns had exchanged messages suggesting they never intended to come into work that day — essentially, they had lied to the manager. The information security team gave the manager a summary of what they had found.

"There was legit concern about the safety of these individuals," the Facebook spokesman said. "In each isolated case, these employees were unresponsive on all communication channels. There's a set of protocols guiding when and how we access employee data when an employee goes missing."

Safety first

While the company is aggressive about dealing with potential threats, the risks are real. Just in recent weeks, Facebook had to deal with a with bomb threat against the company's Menlo Park campus and with an employee getting "swatted" -- that's when an attacker calls in a false emergency to get police to send an armed SWAT team to somebody's home, a prank with potentially fatal results.

One person pointed to an incident in 2015 where the BOLO list was essential. Facebook's security teams recognized the license plate of a suspicious car that was loitering on the company's campus, said a former Facebook physical security employee who left the company in 2016.

The Facebook security guards kept watch on the individual until Menlo Park Police Department officers showed up, the former employee said.

They eventually arrested the driver on charges of indecent exposure for public masturbation, according to a public records request confirming the incident.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/14/faceboo ... -list.html